GeneralOfDeath wrote:I guess I haven't encountered thrid-wave then. I have noted two kinds of feminism: the 20's-esque group that wants the same rights as men (which they pretty much already do), and the 60's-style "let's kill all the men and take over the world" group.

Yeah, the same kind of "pretty much the same rights" as when we used to give people separate drinking fountains. We're still a long, long way from everybody having the same rights as your average white guy.

Seriously, ever since I realized this my life has been great. I love lording it over all my non-white and non-guy friends when my opinions are taken seriously and theirs aren't, when I can wander around freely at night without a worry in the world about people thinking that gives them the right to snuggle me, going to job interviews and getting judged on my resume rather than my makeup, when the cops decide not to hassle me for ridiculous crap even though I'm standing right there with two dozen handguns laid out on the hood of my car and my non-white pals get cuffed and squadcarred just for standing nearby.

My favorite thing lately: every time I post an opinion on the internet, I like to paste links to my lady friends and point out how a thousand strangers didn't show up to make snuggle threats or make uninvited comments about the relative quality of my tits. Being a white guy is the best.

So yeah, we give everybody else the right to vote and then pretend like that makes it a level playing field. Ha ha! Suckers!

Anyway. Men are treated a hundred times better and get a hundred times the opportunities as women, but a hundred times better than shitty is still kind of shitty, so the "same rights as men" thing mostly ended in the nineties when people realized all the hardcoded masculine roles weren't necessarily that great a standard to aspire to. Now feminism tends to be more about better rights for everybody, not just women, so you get the post-punk riot grrls and lipstick feminists and Xena Warrior Princess and all this po-mo deconstruction of gender and sexual roles. It's not about dreaming to fit into the same little boxes as men anymore, it's about not being forced into little boxes at all.